Letter: Legislators need to go to an emergency room

Wednesday

Jun 14, 2017 at 9:42 AM

We need a system solution

The fastest way to get some serious reform of the health care system is to have our legislators spend a weekend evening in the local hospital emergency room. I recently had to go to the emergency room in New Bern on a Sunday night and it was an eye opener. Unless you are carried in on a stretcher, you will have to wait hours to see anyone.

New Bern is lucky to have a fully equipped hospital with a caring staff but the emergency room is completely overloaded because regulations require the hospital emergency room to treat anyone who shows up without regard to whether they have insurance or can pay. As a result the ER has become a walk-in clinic for the flu, nose bleeds, sprains, stomach problems, etc., that should be handled by the urgent care clinics. The walk-in clinics want either insurance or payment, so people who don’t have insurance go to the ER.

The legislature in Raleigh refuses to expand Medicaid, which could help with this problem. The cutbacks in the public health service, the consolidation of medical practices, and the transforming of ERs into walk-in clinics is a social disaster. One result is hospitals are now charging eye-popping bills for services to cover the losses incurred by their treatment of the uninsured.

I’ve even come to realize that single payer or Medicare for all can’t work unless we get the costs down. I’ve looked at the single payer systems in some of the countries and they all have a robust nonprofit public health system with lower cost health services and more public support for training health professionals.

It’s simplistic to say health insurance is for wealth protection or health insurance should be like car insurance. Or the ridiculous comments about people who live the right way don’t develop pre-existing conditions. Health insurance is to help control risk so that an unpredictable accident or life threatening illness will not bankrupt most of us. If an accident happens you don’t have time to shop around for the cheapest body repair.

We need a system solution that could include: free medical school and health provider tuition so doctors don’t come out owing hundreds of thousands of dollars; rebuilding the public health service; more competition in the hospital industry; simpler billing procedures; expanded health insurance for those who can’t afford medical services; serious attention to the chemicals in the environment that are leading to diseases.

Unless we look at the American health care system in a systemic way, there’s is no chance of tackling this problem.

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